About Nick MacKechnie

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I am responsible for a group of customers that have a direct managed support agreement in place with Microsoft. This involves ownership, escalation, coordination, liaison, facilitation, and communication of all aspects associated with the ability of Microsoft to effectively support and manage technical issues and ensure resolutions are delivered within an acceptable and agreed timeframe.

Microsoft Premier Support is designed to identify and prevent problems, increase system availability, reduce development cycle times, and decrease the time required to find effective resolutions for new problems. We know, from our experiences, that for every hour your team spends discussing problems with our Support Professionals, they, on average, spend four times that amount researching and troubleshooting the issue themselves. Our aim is to short-circuit that loop and keep your business up and running.

We do this through proactive engagements such as Operations Consulting (ITIL/MOF), Proactive Healthchecks, Supportability Reviews, Technical Workshops, Service Delivery Planning, understanding business requirements and helping customers align and deliver to business expectations.

Hi All,
The Infrastructure Planning and Design guides (beta documentation) are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. This series aims to clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies,...

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Have you ever wanted a tool that would allow you to evaluate the impact of Microsoft OS Security updates on your environment, including on in-house applications? Over the past few years, Microsoft has worked on just such a tool, which was...

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Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) was released to manufacturing today and will start being available to customers in March, starting with Microsoft Volume Licensing customers. Windows Server 2008 was also released to manufacturing today and...

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Windows Vista Service Pack 1 includes all previously released updates for Windows Vista. Many of these updates are available to the public on the Microsoft Download Centre and Windows Update, while others are only available to specific customers...

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Have you ever wanted to be able to install Microsoft security updates without having to reboot your servers? With Hotpatching, you can do just that for qualifying updates. Please read on for details.
Using Hotpatching Technology to Reduce...

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The SharePoint Product Group has experienced a lot of customers reporting an issue where they would get Event 7076, 6398, 6482 regularly displayed in the Event Log on a SharePoint Server. Information to help identify the event log messages is...

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The goal of MOF is to provide guidance to IT organizations to help them create, operate, and support mission-critical IT services while ensuring that the investment in IT delivers expected business value at an acceptable level of risk. ...

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I wanted to make you aware of the first wave of OpsMgr 2007 Sp1 training videos are now live on TechNet. With significant changes in the SCOM UI and new functionality added to the product, our technology experts are highly recommending these...

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I was recently asked how a Terminal Server holds the license on the client side. In doing the research into this question i came across some really good information about how terminal services works and also the licensing models available....

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We get this query alot in regards to customers wanting to disable access to USB storage devices, without limiting the use of other USB devices. Here's a few things worth looking at:
Knowledge Base Article - http://support.microsoft...

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I thought I would drop a quick note to let you all know that the Trial Guide for Microsoft Application Virtualization has been posted to the web at the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AA787491-8D08-4D2F...

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When released in early 2008, the Windows Server 2008 Security Guide will provide IT professionals with best practices and automated tools to help strengthen the security of servers running Windows Server 2008.
Based on extensive experience...

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Windows Server 2008 Release Candidate helps IT professionals to increase the flexibility and reliability of their server infrastructure while offering developers a more robust web and applications platform for building connected applications...

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I thought you’d be interested in a new Solution Accelerator being developed by Microsoft – it’s called the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint . The toolkit—which is now in Beta release—provides you with best practices and tools to...

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The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) team has announced that a lot of vulnerability-related information will be posted on the new Microsoft Security Vulnerability Research and Defense Blog located at: http://blogs.technet.com/swi...

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We’ve recently released Windows XP SP3 RC (release candidate) for public download. See below for more information. RTM is planned for H1 2008.
Download – The RC can be downloaded as a stand alone package (336MB) from http://www.microsoft...

Hi,
Brief Description
This download will install and register IFilters with the Microsoft Windows Indexing Service. These IFilters are used by Microsoft Search products to index the contents of specific document formats.
Overview
This download...

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I wanted to let you know that Microsoft has received reported cases of Internet Explorer 6 hanging or crashing after installation of security update 942615 (Bulletin MS07-069) on a computer that is running Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Microsoft...

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Tafiti Search Visualization is a Website which brings a new user experience to researching (searching and storing results). It was originally created by Microsoft to demonstrate Silverlight and the Windows Live Search APIs. Now Tafiti has been...

Hi All,
The Infrastructure Planning and Design guides are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. This series aims to clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies, each addressing a unique...

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We sent this information out in September during the mad rush of customers preparing for the Daylight Savings change, however this may have fallen off the radar for customers running Vista and Outlook. Customers running Windows Vista and Outlook...

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SP1 for WSS 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been release . Before you install the service pack there are some very important things to understand. In this post I'll try to provide you with the resources you need to be successful in...

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The 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 1 delivers important customer-requested stability and performance improvements, while incorporating further
enhancements to user security. This service pack also includes all of the updates...